Daily Archives: October 29, 2008

Philadelphia fans had to figure something would go wrong Monday night, though I doubt even they could have anticipated the first suspended postseason game in major league history. The Phillies got within ten outs of their second world championship in Game 5, only to have the Rays tie the game with two outs in the top of the sixth and the umpires call for the tarp after the third out of that frame, after which it rained for 36 hours.

Prior to the 2007 season, Baseball adopted a rule stating that any tie game that is called after becoming official (five innings) would simply be suspended and resumed from the stopping point at a later date just as if it had experience any other extended rain delay. That is what the Rays and Phillies will do tonight, resuming Game 5 in the bottom of the sixth inning at 8:37pm. My preview of what I’m calling Game 5 1/2 is up on SI.com.

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By John C. McGinley (as told to Alex Belth)

I’m spit-balling with you but my favorite memories of Yankee Stadium came from a period of time when everyone I knew was an unemployed actor. I’m from New York originally. I was born in St Vincent’s in the Village and lived in Peter Stuyvesant Town until I was ten. Then my parents moved to the suburbs in Jersey but later I went to NYU and then lived on Perry and Bleecker for close to twenty years before I finally came out here in ’91. I got out of NYC to 84 and for the next five years, everyone I knew was unemployed actors. You’d get an off-Broadway play, or a day job on a soap, but mostly it was a grind, it was a struggle.

I loved to go up to the Bronx on an afternoon and catch a game. I’d go up to a day game at 161 and find all the other unemployed actors. Some guys would go to Shea but I never rooted for the Mets until Willie became their manager a few years ago and then I loved them.

The Yankees were terrible then. It wasn’t like today, getting a ticket was no sweat even if you were dead broke. Seats weren’t hard to come by. If a scalper was eating a scalper ticket sandwich two innings into the game, you could get it on the cheap. The scalper would have to eat it by that time. So we’d start up in the cheap seats and then move down. Most of us brought our own booze in with us, everybody brought what they needed. There would only be something like 12,000 people in the Stadium on a weekday afternoon. The ushers would let you down by the dugout because they were unemployed actors too.

The one thing that was understood was that nobody asked each other what they were doing. Cause the answer was, you’re doing nothing. You’re going to a Yankee game cause the phone’s not ringing. There were no cell phones in those days so guys would get up during the game and go use a payphone to call their machine to see if anyone on the planet would give them a job. And then you’d go back and watch the game for three hours and get lost in it and be happy.

We’d bust each other’s humps and argue and see who could memorize the most statistics. Tommy Sizemore had a photographic memory that was not dissimilar to Bob Costas’s ability to recall stats and facts. I was so pathetic I’d bring Roger Angell books up. I read his stuff in the New Yorker and his collections. Halberstam’s writing in the Summer of ’49 and especially The Teammates. I’m a sucker for baseball writing because the game lends itself to poetic prose. Some people think it’s too much but I think it’s great. So we’d talk about baseball and be having a good time.

I loved Yankee Stadium because of the colors and the smells and the potential for anything to happen in the bottom of the ninth. Baseball dictates that you can always come back and even in those years when the team was awful anything could happen. It was the perfect place to be for a young, unemployed actor. Things just seemed unlimited. Day games are from God. They are the greatest.

John C. McGinley plays Dr. Perry Cox on NBC’s Scrubs.

My wife Emily and I painted our apartment a few months back.  When we got to the bedroom, we chose a pale green.  “Green is a tricky color,” my mother said, and sure enough when we stared slapping it on the walls, we realized we had made a mistake. 

Lesson: Never buy a color called “Impetuous.”  So we tried another shade of green, which we liked…until the sun went down and our room turned into something out of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. 

Wait til we put the pictures back, then it will look better.  Emily gave in.  The thought of re-painting was worse than living in a Fun House.  And eventually, with the pictures back on the wall, it did start to feel like home. 

The new site here doesn’t feel like home yet.  It has that new car vibe.  The technology is new, there are two new contributors, and a bunch of issues to address–the archives, the comment section, the links.  It has been overwhelming.  Exciting, but strange and new. 

I’m amped about where we are headed.  I just wanted to let you know, that I empathize with some of your reactions to the change and appreciate all of the feedback you’ve provided.  It’s going to take a minute, and things will continue to be tweaked over the next couple of months, but we’re working on it, and you aren’t alone in getting used to the new digs. 

Thanks for coming back.

Gordon Whiten – a 64-year-old janitor from the Bronx – always catches the 2 train at Jackson Avenue before 6:00 a.m. There’s usually enough room on the last car for him to stretch out, drink his coffee and read the newspaper.

This morning he hoisted his cup and made a toast:

“I know this is dangerous business, but old habits are hard to break.”

Whiten took a big swig and explained:

“If the cops catch me drinking coffee on the train I’m going down for sure. I’ve seen people get tickets for just holding an empty cup. But the coppers ain’t usually out this early so I’m gonna keep going.”

Whiten is headed downtown to the same job he’s had for 45 years.

“They call me a Maintenance Engineer nowadays,” he said, “but that’s just a fancy name. Being a janitor isn’t the greatest job, but having any job is pretty good.”

There was a time when he hoped for more.

“I wanted to be a ballplayer just like every kid does,” Whiten admitted. “I still think about it sometimes when I’m at Yankee Stadium or watching on television.”

He laughed to himself and then continued:

“It’s an old man’s dream now, but any kind of dream can be dangerous business.”

Whiten took another gulp of coffee and went back to his newspaper.

Happy Humpday … here now the news!

• MLB.COM’s Anthony DiComo has some big news from the mouth of Brian Cashman:

1. Chien-Ming Wang got a thumbs up from the doctors after a pain-free bullpen session Monday.
2. He wouldn’t comment on whether the Yanks would discipline Joba Chamberlain for his recent DUI incident.
3. He isn’t counting on Mussina returning for 2009, at least at this point.

• ESPN reports that Willie Randolph denied a report stating he was interested in a coaching job with the Nats. Randolph is being considered for the managerial position in Milwaukee. (Thanks to Baseball Musings for the link)
• USA Today has a piece penned by Gary Thorne detailing the issue of tax-exempt bonds being used to finance new stadiums (Mets, Yanks, Nets). It is noted that teams are getting “interest-free loans” through the issuance of tax-exempt federal bonds for construction of the stadiums and allowing them to pay them back in place of taxes. However, as of Friday, the IRS revised their regulations to prevent future deals where tax-free bonds could be used in this manner to avoid taxes.
• Over at SI.COM, Jon Heyman has some tasty Yankee tidbits:

1. If you believe Jimmy Rollins (a good friend of C.C. Sabathia), the Yankees will end up the winner of the Sabathia Sweepstakes.
2. Matt Holliday intrigues the Yanks, but they are wary of his home/road splits.
3. One of the reasons Brian Cashman stayed with the Bombers was because Pat Gillick warned him to avoid the Mariners opening at all costs.

• Happy 33rd birthday to former Yankee (and Banter punchline) Karim Garcia. Also, a happy 49th b-day to the cannon-armed (and once traded for Banter fave Al Leiter) Jesse Barfield.

Mike Mussina hasn’t told the Yankees yet if he wants to play next year. At least, no one’s telling if he has. Baseball puts a moratorium on such announcements during the World Series (even if Scott Boras doesn’t comply), but rumor has it he’s leaning toward retirement. I, for one, would love to have Mussina come back for a variety of reasons stretching from his actual performance, to his influence on the Yankees’ young starters, to the likely brevity of his contract, to my own selfish need to hear some legitimately introspective and wickedly sarcastic postgame comments every five days.

Unfortunately, rumor has Mussina leaning in the other direction. Indeed, at the conclusion of Living on the Black, John Feinstein’s plodding account of Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine’s 2007 seasons, Mussina, speaking at the conclusion of his rough 2007 season, sounds convinced that 2008 would be his last year:

“I’m not going to be one of these players who announces his retirement five different times. But right now, I don’t see myself pitching after this year. I’m not going to be close enough to three hundred [wins], even if I have a good year, that I’m going to want to come back for at least two more years and, realistically, three more years.

“In 2006, I pitched about as well as I could have hoped to pitch, and I won fifteen games. If I win fifteen games a year–stay healthy, pitch well, all of that–for the next three years, I would still be five wins short of three hundred, and I’d be forty-two years old. What’s more, my older son will be a teenager by then, and my younger one is only a few years behind. I don’t want to come home just when they’re saying, ‘See ya, Dad.’

“I’ve had a good career. I’m lucky to be in a position that whenever I retire, I don’t have to do anything. I can pick and choose what I want to do or what I don’t want to do. If I have a great year, that might make it harder to walk away. But my plan right now is to walk away, and when the calls come the next spring from teams desperate for pitching, my answer–even if I’m tempted–will be no.”

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